Everything to do with phonetics. Please note: comments not signed with your genuine name may be removed.

Wednesday, 30 September 2009

Eye-rack and Eye-ran

Here’s a nice little video from YouTube. It’s an advertisement for CNN, in which Christine Amanpour purports to attempt to teach the approved pronunciation of Iraq(i) and Iran to a would-be presenter who wants to say them with /aɪ-/.

The last two seconds of the clip is nice, too. We’re supposed to say /tʃetʃˈnjɑː/.

While on the subject of mispronunciations, a few weeks ago I saw the former US presidential candidate John McCain pronouncing infectious as /ɪnˈfektʃuəs/. Put that in the same box as prenuptial (blog, 9 June 2006) and rumbustious (blog, 27 Nov 2008).

In that case, she should go the whole hog because the sound represented by the "a" in "Iran" in Persian is more or less the same sound represented by "o" in the given name "Ron(ald)". However, I am inclined to agree with the first comment. What obligates us to pronounce the name exactly as it is pronounced in the language of origin?

/tSEtS"njA:/ breaks English phonotactic restrictions, so would seem an odd choice for a standard pronunciation. And I doubt anyone who had only heard of the country through news of its troubles with Russia would even recognise /tSE"tSEni@/ - out of context, I wouldn't have. Was it the traditional term?

As for the /aI/ in the usual American pronunciation of Iran and Iraq, where did it come from? According to Etymonline, both words were loaned in the 20th century, so Greatly Shifted Vowels seem unlikely. Is this another inexplicable spelling pronunciation like the British pronunciation of /aIbi:T@/?

Could it be that they say /aɪ-/ in the US at the beɡɡinninɡ Iran and Italian because the name starts with the letter I? A similar problem arises when they say Laos as /leɪɒs/ instead of /laʊ/ When the French added the 's' at the end of Lao to refer to the unified Lao provinces, they weren't expecting anyone to pronounce the letter. Neither did they expect that the letter letter 'A' would be said as its capital name.On the other hand we say Paris with an 's' so they should have expected it! As far as 'how should we say the names?' I feel there a slight obligation to show some level of education by trying imitate the way any local says the name of their domicile. Australians say Melbourne as Melbun but in Britain there is a desire to use the ɔː sound. In Thai, as it is a phonetic language, most names can and are said as they are in the relevant country.

1. Educated speech in English includes knowing how a place is called in English. If there's no tradition, you'd naturally take the native name and approximate it, using the English repertoire including the few established extras such as nasal vowels or phonotactically uncommon combinations. Using a perfect native pronunciation sounds incredibly nouveau-lettré. Sometimes foreigners who speak an otherwise accent-free English make this mistake when they pronounce a name or term of their native language.

2. Using forms such as srpski would irritate native speakers if they're used in places where the original language asks for an oblique case and the like. So, you'd have to ask everybody to know fine points of grammar in all languages in addition, and how they apply to the target language. It was fun with Latin in learned 19th-ct English or German, but it wouldn't work universally.

3. If you write in IPA, you couldn't use the broad transcription you use.

4. Never mind the stress, in Albanian, the usual form is Kosova, sometimes Kosovë.

Does anyone ever actually pronounce the Albanian q or the Macedonian ќ as [c]? I mean, I lack any first-hand experience, but I've been told they're [kʲ] in the south and [t͡ɕ] in the north. [c] is the sound of Hungarian ty, something much more similar to [tʲ] than to [kʲ].

This is also a discrepancy between the English and the German Wikipedias about modern standard Greek, where the English one claims /k/ is turned into [c] by front vowels, while the German one says [kʲ] comes out instead (and its discussion page says various affricates occur in the dialects).

It's [ˈŝərpskiː], not [ˈsrpskiː].

Are you sure that wouldn't be a Slovene accent? :^) At least some people, such as my dad, really do use syllabic [r] without any trace of a vowel on either side.

Eye-rack is not a linguistic issue. Military personnel say it that way because the president who got us into it said it that way. Those who supported that prez and that decision, and many with friends or family in service, use Eye-rack as a small gesture of loyalty.